Infection

where they saved me

The light is refracting off of all the stainless steel and stabbing me. I feel it. I feel it coming off of the tables, the tools, the monitors. The flourescent lights above my head are flickering and it is catching off of the stainless steel, sharpening itself and then looking at me with angry eyes. The light thinks I have betrayed it. The light thinks I have betrayed it. The light thinks that as I lay here, restrained, I am betraying it. It will not let this stand.

The room has green tile walls. I like green. I am green. Right now. My mind won't let go of a vision of rotting meat. My stomach is lurching with anger and hunger. I should not be awake for this. This is a healing process. This is natural. But the natural reaction to a body in a state of decay is to be unconscious, asleep, not feeling this. My mind is stuck on the vision of rotting meat and I can smell it.

I am wet. It is cold and my skin is tissue paper. I am too weak to move and yet thick leather cuffs have me manacled to the table. The light will bring someone. The light does not abide betrayal. The light has warriors. I have seen them. They wear surgical masks. They wear long white gowns and rubber gloves. They try to act compassionate. They put their hands on me and tell me reassuring things but I do not believe them because as one of them heals, the other stabs.

The room has green tile walls. There are shadows. There are shadows hidden in the cracks of the walls. I want to say something about the shadows. They know about the shadows. Anyone who has ever worked for the light knows about the shadows. I want to say something about the laughter. I want to say something about the pain. Every single cell in my body is dying. I can hear them screaming in my head. I can feel them. Toes, fingers, bladder, spleen. The light keeps stabbing me and it's soldiers keep taunting me and I am strapped down to a bed on fire. There are tubes running from my arms, chest, face. They are draining me. They are draining me. The are sucking me dry. As the cells die they are taking that energy from me. They are taking my light from me and as every bit of it is drained from my body the smell of rot in my nose gets worse and the vision of the rotted meat gets worse and now I taste it and now I know I am going to be nothing but a carcass, nothing but meat and everything will be over and done and

They bring her in. They let her take my hand. They use her tears to try to qwell the bed fire. The light gets confused by her presence. The refractions, however briefly form a halo around her.

A rubber glove wraps around her slender neck. I want to scream. I want to move but I am but a little child covered now in rotting meat, so heavy, so thick, so putrid. A rubber gloved hand wraps around her slender neck and a needle gets placed to a vein and I hear her scream, so distant, so far far away as the plunger is pushed down and her tears multiply but now they are infected and the fire within me burns even brighter and men in white strip her of her clothes.

A second bed with restraints is rolled into the room and

the rotting meat is everywhere now

I

so very

hungry

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Shamble

I think it is the smell that gets to me the most. It smells of wet earth, blood and dead animal. Since coming back I haven't been able to shake the smell from my nostrils. I have tried everything. I have scorched myself, arms bound behind me in showers. I have collapsed an unconscious shivering wreck at the bottom of the tub as she twirled the hot and cold water dials for me. Always helpful that girl is. I have tried cauterizing the inside of my nose with a metal pen roasted with a Zippo lighter. Tied to a chair, her sitting naked in my lap, singing to herself as she warmed it to glowing and then her smiling eyes on me as she rode my bucking frame like a fairground ride.

I have tried snorting baby powder and cocaine and even whippits of aerosol deodorants in an attempt to hold the reek of it at bay.

Nothing works.

I think it is the smell that gets me the most.

The smell of the rot.

The smell of the rot and the constant, dull throbbing on starving, empty veins.

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shamble

I am in the store, the General Store, the supply post of the ghost town. I am standing by the boarded door looking at a dwarf Coke machine that gives you those dwarf bottles that haven't slaked a thirst since the late seventies and have probably become fermented and, therefore, rotten.

Another for the list I guess.

I am standing by the counter with its crank handled cash register, rotten nuts in a bowl and post office boxes turned into a deluxe condo for the local spider population. I am standing forensic scene straight, not wanting to touch anything. I don't know if it's because I don't want to leave any traces behind or if I not want this place to leave any traces on me. Despite the smell of the rot there is something living here. I can smell that. I can almost feel that. Something faint is brushing on my shields and it stirs something in me. It stirs something that I will call passion but I really know is hunger. Something here is brushing on my shields and it is stirring my belly. Where there is smell, taste follows.

There is the copper taste of blood in my mouth.

Something has been left here for me to find.

Something has been left here rotting.

I feel it. It is brushing against my shields. It is crawling over my skin and into my mouth. It has breath that releases as a sigh in my ear and it has a stench to it that gets into my lungs.

I force it out of me. It comes out of me as a little girl’s scream.

I sigh.

I hate it when it is little girls.

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shamble

On the night that Amy-Rae died I thought I might have found an answer.

For this I have to thank Amy-Rae.

Amy-Rae refused to live and to die a useless life. That had been her thing all the days of her life.She had to have meaning.

I thought that Amy-Rae; that giggling mad bitch who took such joy in “Helping” me in those first few days of my condition, solved the thing for me. Guess I’ll always love her a bit for that.

We stood there that night hand in hand holding the gas cans.

I was twitching and groaning; my natural state of being in those days when neurons fired and atrophied muscles mixed the signals up and my lungs tried to process air through the tattered remains of my throat.

She was mostly naked, in her best summer clothes, a pair of skanky shorts and flip flop sandals.

She was stitch rich and heavily perfumed. They had wanted her to look good in the box. Amy came from people who cared about that sort of thing. The Y shaped cut from shoulder blades down to her pelvis was so well done you almost couldn’t see it in the half light. Clothed, you couldn’t see the stitched together remains of her arms or any of the tears in her legs. Her condition was betrayed only in the way she moved. Her condition was betrayed often in the way she fucked. There wasn’t much fluidity of her movements.

I was amazed how none of the men we’d left along the road had noticed that.

I guess, happy to get anything, you don’t notice the claws at your skin.

I loved it though.

I loved the way she moved.

Her voice was a horror show and she was not much to look at, my sweet little Amy-Rae… but oh how she moved. She left me on the porch of the rotten old frame house that had been the scene of her childhood years and childhood tortures and walked to the centre of the room. I watched, through the front window, as she moved from room to room gas can in hand.

She was spilling it on the floor, spraying on the support walls, tossing the gas everywhere she could. She then tossed the can aside, turned to look at me and reached into the pocket of her skanky little shorts short shorts for her Zippo lighter. I calmly placed my hands on the walls and closed my eyes. The smell got bad then, like really bad, but I could feel it happening. This wood was old. It was long past dead. It wanted to rot. Every single cell in it was desperate for that kind of release. I listened as she said good bye and I heard the clink of the Zippo opening. I concentrated. I forgot the smell. I forgot the mostly naked girl in front of me and how much she made my chest hurt. I forgot about my latent fear of fire and I just let it go. I had been down. I had been under the earth. I had been rotting. I just closed my eyes and willed the wood to do the same.It wants it.

I want it to have it.

Symbiosis.

The walls, instantly, started giving up their cellular structure and the burning house, started to groan, started to moan, started to want collapse.

Amy dances as it burns, Amy dances as it falls.

It is a sexy strange shuffle of broken legs through flame. Her dead and raped and desiccated body dances, celebrating the death of home. It is the end of the place where she had been made; night after night after night by his big hands, suffocating drunken breath and endless pain between her legs.

I love how she moves.

We bring the house down.

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shamble

There is one who believes me because he had known Amy Rae. There is one who believes me because he was the one who was there when she died that night.

There is one who believes me because he believes it was his lust driven prayer (please please please she’s the only one who ever did these things for me please let her not be dead) that kept Amy Rae alive.

He believes lots of batty shit.

He won't ever stand for me in a court and I don't think he's been out of his parent's cellar in a decade. He was round, and fat and generally harmless. On his best day he could touch. On his worst day he would cry. He was brain dense and body thick. He was safe. I could see why Amy Rae liked spending time here.

I am slumped in a broken arm chair staring at a Grateful Dead poster. They had no fucking idea. They really didn’t. He is stripping out of his clothes and rummaging in his closet for his hand cuffs.

The one who believes me says I exist because I should have died.

A creature akin to death got the scent of me as I lay there dying in the church and it thought I’d make a fairly decent new home. It crawled into the bleeding hole in my chest and set up shop.

He says that I am the anti-doctor now.

Where the normal mouth breathers struggled against the tide (for what in life is as inevitable as death?) I myself was more a surfer… grabbing people unawares from the beach and throwing them headlong into the waves.

He talked a lot that one.

He fastens the ball gag into his own mouth and uses a combination of his desk and his meaty thighs to close the cuffs tight around his wrist.

He believes in magic.

He believes in life after death.

He believes that the only way a girl like Amy Rae would have gotten naked for him was if she loved him. And he loved her. So he had to follow.

He was a fat fuck backing the wrong horse and just now realizing how useless his life is was and had been.

He craved suicide but was way too lazy to make any effort.

Thus, he wanted me to murder him. He was such a lazy son of a bitch. This was suicide by homicide; like death by cop except I’m nothing like a cop.

He was how I learned how to hone the art, how to, more or less, control the smell.

Okay, not really. How could there be? There is life and there is death and there is this weird thing I do.

I’ll never get rid of the smell.

But he did teach me that I can rot cells through the symbiosis. He did teach me that I can bring a house down. He did teach me that I can turn white skin purple with a touch. Which is a great trick because bruising the living shit out of him while he begged me to end him did teach me how to endure the smell long enough to kill.

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rise

I found the bad man's house easily enough.

It is not really that hard to find someone these days if you have it in your head to do so. It didn't take long to convince the door it didn't want to be a door anymore and it didn't take much to rot the wood out around the lock.

I slowly crept up the stairs to the second floor, past the baby's room, past the bathroom into the main bedroom. I quietly walked across the carpet to the bed. The woman was still, hours after their seemingly endless lovemaking, bound with steel and still sleeping on the floor at his feet. I say nothing of things I know nothing about for fear of sounding like an idiot. It has got to be uncomfortable but, not knowing anything about their lives who was I to judge their sleeping arrangements?

I looked at him a moment and tried to place his face.

I couldn't.

I couldn't even place it on the night that he had pointed the gun at me. I was hoping seeing his face would jog some of the memories of that night. I was a little interested to know what happened between my walking out the door that night and waking up six days later in a wood box laid out on a bar with lilies tickling my nose and everyone I know crying, drinking, dancing slowly around me.

Sadly I got nothing.

I had nothing.

I had no idea who he was and, cute as he was, he was doing nothing for me.

I tried to sniff away the smell and put a finger to one of his teeth. Then another.

Then another. I watched them rot away in his mouth one after the other until he started to stir. I put a finger to his forehead to hold him down and let the skin dissolve like it so wanted to. Cells have only one purpose. Recreate, die. When things die, they rot. I watched the bruise spread all around his face. I stood there, rotting the fucker who shot me in the chest on what was supposed to be the happiest day of my life until the smell got to be too much and I had to leave. I took one of the ice cubes from his water glass, placed it against the exposed nerves of the rotted teeth and ran as fast as I could.

It wasn’t very fast. By that point I had lost a good part of the musculature of my leg. But I did get away.

I stood a while in his backyard listening to the screams, my eyes up and on the moon. It was big and white and dead… it always had been. It was kept from rotting only by the cold black space around it.